Posted in Economics, History | Tagged F. A. Hayek, Federalist Papers, Mark Levin, Milton Friedman, Politics, Required Reading, Thomas Sowell | Leave a Comment »
BillShrink has an interesting and informative visualization of the National Debt (i.e. Obama’s credit card in our names). Click on the image to see it in a larger format over at BillShrink:
Posted in Economics | Tagged economy, Federal Budget, National Debt, Obama, Politics, statism | Leave a Comment »
In the short video interview embedded below Scott Rasmussen estimates that in the 2010 elections the GOP will pick up 5 to 8 seats in the Senate and 25 to 30 seats in the House, which would result in the Democrats retaining control of both chambers. Though I think that the carnage inflicted on the Party of Slavery to the State will be even worse than that, he points out the obvious fact that a good economy in October could help the Democrats. As I mentioned recently, some economists do argue that 2010 may be the best economic year of Obama’s presidency and even a temporary upturn could help stem some of the heavy losses expected to be inflicted on the Democrats in November. Conversely, if the jobs picture in October looks more like today the GOP could indeed take the House and get close to taking the Senate. Interestingly, Rasmussen points out almost in passing that the GOP might not want to be in control of Congress heading into 2012. He has a real point.
There is no doubt that wresting control of Congress away from these power-drunk government-loving statists will clearly be a good thing, and no sane person would suggest anything less than a full-bore attempt to win every possible seat. Frankly, the future of the Republic depends on it. But perhaps simply being close enough to a 50/50 split would be a better long-term result for the GOP as long as they can still obstruct the statist agenda of Obama and his minions. While controlling at least one half of Congress would go a long way toward stopping Comrade Obama’s frantic rush toward socialism, let’s not forget that undoing the damage done by this administration is going to require control of the White House. Even a lame duck Obama wields a difficult-to-override veto and there is no chance of gaining a two-thirds majority of both houses in 2010. Our primary goal is to remove the most radical President in US history from office after one term, and being the minority party in 2012 would allow the GOP to adopt a different position as complete outsiders.
Rasmussen makes some other points about Evan Bayh’s retirement and the Scott Brown election that are worth watching as well. But his point about the strategy of remaining the minority party has some real merit. The perfect solution would be a 50/50 split in the Senate, which would give the dumbest man in politics something to do, and perhaps being down only a vote or two in the House would suffice. A second term for the least qualified, most radical President in history would likely be the death knell of American Exceptionalism and may also be the final nail in the statist-built coffin for the American Experiment, a liberty first philosophy in which the freedom-loathing Mr. Obama simply does not believe.
Posted in Elections | Tagged economy, Obama, Politics, Rasmussen, statism | Leave a Comment »
I found a short post over at Skepticblog in which Michael Shermer simply attempts to demonstrate that the number 3.8 trillion is an almost inconceivably large number. You have probably already recognized that particular number as the size, in dollars, of President Obama’s proposed budget. Not surprisingly, that did not go unnoticed among the respondents in the comments section who immediately criticized Shermer. Some felt that the post may not belong on the skeptical site, which is fair, but the very first commenter opined that “in this case your politics appear to be getting in the way and this is sounding like a personal blog”, while another inexplicably referred to the post as “Obama bashing”. As always there are some very interesting comments from both sides of the argument but two interesting things come to mind from these responses to Shermer’s completely apolitical post.
First, it is illuminating that simply utilizing analogies to demonstrate how large a number is has some reactionaries on the Left up in arms. Though Shermer does point out that the large number being discussed is the size of the President’s proposed budget, he does not get political at all. At worse all he does is some math to show how much this spending would end up costing each American. Too many of these alleged skeptics are letting the emotions of their politics cloud their vision.
Second, the responses illustrate once again that too many skeptics tend to suspend their skepticism when it comes to government, a phenomenon that I previously noted in a post about ClimateGate. A commenter named Daniel put it very well:
I’ve often puzzled over the tendency of atheists, scientists, and skeptics to lean left. Maybe it’s simply a knee-jerk reaction to the sheer ignorance and stupidity displayed by the right. Whatever the case, I’ve noticed that most skeptics are NOT skeptical when it comes to politics- in fact, they seem to me to be even more gullible than their Neanderthalic, creationist, anti-gay counterparts on the right. For example, anyone who has read P.Z. Meyers’ blog will immediately notice that he is not the least skeptical of government bureaucrats or central planners. Shermer is a rarity- a libertarian skeptic, someone who’s not afraid to turn a skeptical, scientific eye on government planners.
This particular blog [post] is simply him to trying to put in perspective the gargantuan size of the Leviathan state, but I’m far more interested in the backlash he gets for simply by trying to comprehend the sheer scope and waste of government in America today.
There’s no reason why skepticism should stop at foot of Capitol Hill, any more than skepticism should stop at the threshold of churches and mosques.
For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Michael Shermer, I recommend an interesting post called The Other ‘L’ Word: Why I am a Libertarian. If you have some time on your hands, you can read his much longer but very thoughtful post titled How I Became a Libertarian. He starts the “L word” post with this:
In a nutshell, I am a libertarian because conservatives are a bunch of gun-toting, Hummer-driving, hard-drinking, Bible-thumping, black-and-white-thinking, fist-pounding, shoe-stomping, morally-hypocritical blowhards, and liberals are a bunch of tree-hugging, whale-saving, hybrid-driving, sandle-wearing, bottled-water-drinking, ACLU-supporting, flip-flopping, wishy-washy, Namby Pamby bedwetters. There’s a better way. Libertarianism.
As consistent as skeptics like to be, liberal skeptics have not yet figured out how to shine their logical skepticism on politics. It perplexes me.
Posted in Skepticism | Tagged Federal Budget | Leave a Comment »
Hat tip to Dan Riehl for initially pointing me to this news story via Twitter. You can follow Dan on Twitter here.
Proposed changes to the North Carolina high school history curriculum have many people upset with critics correctly pointing out that the state is simply cutting out the first half of U.S. History.
This article on the Charlotte NBC affiliate’s web site includes the video of their news story on the controversy and gives a good synopsis of the controversy.
One quote from Rebecca Garland, the chief academic officer for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, really rubbed me the wrong way. From an article at FoxNews:
We are certainly not trying to go away from American history. What we are trying to do is figure out a way to teach it where students are connected to it, where they see the big idea, where they are able to make connections and draw relationships between parts of our history and the present day.
The changes being considered would apply to eleventh graders in the state, who currently study American history beginning with the nation’s founding. Garland would seem to prefer that this “big idea” understanding of America and why it is special be formed by constraining the young people of North Carolina to examining the second, far more statist half of our nation’s history. Educators are actually hurting their students and their country when they mislead our young people into believing that the Big Idea of America has something to do with labor unions or progressivism or redistributing wealth or the ideas of Fabian socialists like Wilson, FDR, or Obama. In fact, the most important concepts of American history are the founding ideals, and the key to understanding American Exceptionalism is in knowing enough about our history and our founding principles to realize how special this country truly is.
Remember that many of these eleventh graders will soon be off to face progressive (Marxist) professors who seem to hate everything about America except their own cushy and often subsidized academic positions. Authority figures like that are all too often a part of what Mark Levin correctly labels the counter revolution, with goals and ideologies that are diametrically opposed to our founding principles. Knowing that today’s high school students will be facing off against this bevy of Ward Churchill types tomorrow, we should instead be teaching the incredible historical significance of the revolution on which our country is based. It is vitally important to stress that the American Revolution was not simply a revolution against English rule. It was a revolution against the idea that people were subjects at all. It was a revolution against a long-standing and almost unbroken world acceptance of an inappropriate relationship between the State and the Individual. If students have only one take-away from US History it should be that simple fact. Many have correctly argued that the American Revolution was not truly complete until the abolition of slavery in 1865, and even that part of America’s history would be left out of the proposed curriculum.
An article by the Heritage Foundation argues that this history-finagling is SOP for the Progressives:
Early 20th century Progressives also taught that nothing before 1877 has meaning for today. In his new book We Still Hold These Truths: Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future, Matthew Spalding recounts Progressives attack on America’s First Principles. The Progressives sought to remake America, so that the Declaration’s Founding Principles, the Constitution’s institutional structures, and the Civil War’s meaning as a victory for Founding principles would no longer ring true. The progressives argued that equal, natural rights were non-existent; government creates rights. They replaced representative government with the administrative, bureaucratic state.
There is no reason to believe that Ms. Garland or any others in the education establishment in North Carolina are part of a Progressive conspiracy to create adults without a deep appreciation for the Founding Principles. The unfortunate case is that in many cases liberal thinking seems to naturally, even if unintentionally, flow in the direction of results that are favorable to those who seek to redefine our country and in many cases reject its traditions and institutions. Whether sinister or just misguided, these proposed curriculum changes would force formative North Carolina students to build their perspectives of America – and their understanding of what makes America special – on a skewed view of America in which progress is presented as acceptance of Fabian socialist ideals and exponential increases in government involvement in the lives of individuals.
The potential changes involve more than just compartmentalizing the first half of American history out of the North Carolina high school curriculum. As the FoxNews article points out, rather than studying world history ninth-graders would instead pursue something called global studies which would focus “in part on issues such as the environment”. In a real sense this change seems to be an even wider version of the accompanying changes to the American history curriculum for eleventh graders. An appreciation of what makes the American experiment so special requires an understanding of the historical evolution of the country’s founding and the principles underlying its formation. Similarly, an educated understanding of the significance of western civilization requires a study of the history of the Greeks and the Romans and the British and their interactions with the other powers in their respective times. Though I have not been able to locate details about this potential change to the world history classes, the fact that the name of the class would change from World History to Global Studies suggests that North Carolina’s ninth graders are not going to be learning of Pericles or Hannibal or William the Conqueror. No, Global Studies sounds a little more… squishy.
In order for America to stay special, Americans have to know why they are special. Anything that seeks to undermine the teaching and appreciation of the American founding is a threat to the American Experiment. In fact, there should be an entire class on the American Founding including the Articles of Confederation and how its failures led to our incredible Constitution. That would certainly prepare our young people to go defend their country against the counter revolutionaries that we inexplicably permit to mold the minds of our college students.
On a positive note, at least one elected official in North Carolina has said that the state legislature will step in if the state board decides to implement these changes.
Posted in History | Tagged education, History, News, North Carolina, Politics, progressives, statism | 19 Comments »
In an article at The American Spectator titled The Coming Crash of 2011, Peter Ferrara points out the historical failure of Keynesian governmental intrusion into the free market and contrasts the observed and expected results of Obama’s ideological policies with the known results of President Reagan’s markedly different approach.
Bad economic policies can throw economies into downturns, and delay recoveries. Keynesian economics and rising effective tax rates produced four worsening inflation/recession cycles in and around the 1970s: 1969-1970, 1973-1974, 1979-1980, and 1982.
But Reaganomics was so successful that it all but abolished the business cycle for a generation. The economy took off at the end of 1982 on a 25-year economic boom interrupted by only two, short, shallow recessions in 1990-1991 and 2001. That is why today we no longer recognize the natural workings of the business cycle.
He makes a good point. Several years ago, well before our current government-caused financial crisis, it dawned on me that I was incredibly lucky to have lived my entire adult life in such comfortable and successful times. Most people have indeed forgotten that there is a natural business cycle.
The slow and weak recovery from the recession, which has lasted almost two years (a postwar record), shows yet again the failure of Keynesian economics, continuing a long, unbroken record of failure stretching back to the 1930s.
But the Obama Administration came into office knowing that the economy would ultimately recover as the business cycle turned up naturally, and planned to reap the political credit, enabling still greater leaps of neo-socialism. Internally, they are surprised and miffed that it has taken so long, not understanding that their own, blindly anti-market policies only delayed recovery.
Virtually every economic decision made by Mr. Obama since the start of his presidency has perplexed me. Admittedly, by late 2008 it was obvious to me who this character was and I fully expected him to govern like a naïve leftist, at least initially. But having witnessed a few of these cycles I also predicted that the self-preservation that often springs from plunging approval ratings would force some economic pragmatism reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s triangulations in the mid-nineties. However, this President’s ideologically based proposals seem so clearly bad for the economic outlook that I am left with only two choices for explanations. Either they really are that clueless about economics or their ideology simply trumps it. Neither of those scenarios bode well for Americans, particularly the future generations about whom today’s liberals seem so coldly unconcerned.
Quoting Art Laffer (of Laffer Curve fame), the author makes the argument that 2010 will be the best economic year of President Obama’s reign. First, there is a natural bounce-back that can be expected after this deep a fall. Combined with the effects, albeit short term, of the massive monetary expansion by the Federal Reserve and an artificial heightened productivity resulting from an attempt to beat the tax increases of 2011 this should cause a bubble of growth in 2010.
But Laffer ominously continues that “when the U.S. economy comes to 2011, the train’s going to come off the tracks.” He argues that the effect of the massive monetary expansion by the Fed will be “petering out” and points out that changes to tax policy are going to contribute to this economic stagnation and collapse:
“And we haven’t even begun to talk about the tax rate increases of 2011. These purely ideological abuses of economic policy will end up punishing working people nationwide. The top income tax rate is scheduled to increase by close to 20%, the capital gains tax rate by at least 33%, and the top dividends tax rate by 164%. Further tax increases in the pending health care legislation would raise these tax rates still more.”
The article’s author closes with this assessment:
Again, just the opposite of the long-term economic boom that followed the 1982 downturn when Reagan first slayed inflation, the flowering of growth in Obama’s second year will be followed by long-term stagnation and economic decline for America, slaying the American Dream, until President Obama’s neo-socialist economic policies are reversed.
I think that the writing is already on the wall for the November 2010 elections. It will almost certainly be a disaster for the Democrats. If Laffer’s dismal economic forecast is accurate, the 2012 elections could be an epic landslide reflecting an outright rejection of the American left’s love affair with Big Government Keynesianism.
Now enjoy this enjoyably funny video of “Keynes and Hayek” rapping about their conflicting economic theories.
Posted in Economics | Tagged economy, Hayek, Keynesian, Obama, Politics, Taxation | 1 Comment »
Matthias Shapiro, the guy behind Political Math, has produced another short but illuminating video in which he discusses President Obama’s announced budget freeze. Like his other visualizations, which include the Obama Budget Cuts Visualization and The National Debt Road Trip, this one cuts through the chaff and puts things in perspective. In short, the freeze is a joke.
Shapiro then points out the inherent dishonesty of how they are presenting this ”freeze”.
First of all, I hate the “we’re saving $250 billion over 10 years” line. It is a piece of crass political rhetoric and I’m disappointed that the administration would use it. If they actually implement a three year freeze on the portion of the budget they’re talking about (which is a big if, but let’s assume the best), why measure the effects in the space of 10 years?
The answer is “To make the freeze look bigger”. They’re basically just basing the extended savings off of projected interest payments and “savings” due to the fact that the baseline on that portion of the budget hasn’t moved. It is setting a dangerous data precedent where politicians realize that all they have to do is calculate a projection out as far as they need in order to get the numbers they want.
Seriously. This is a three year freeze but they stretch it out to ten years in their calculations simply because 10x is a larger number than the real number, a mere 3x. Your intelligence is being insulted and it should piss you off. The statist triad of Obama, Reid, and Pelosi tell you that they believe that you are a moron every single day with their shallow obfuscations and pathetic word games, such as their tortured destruction of the word ‘reform’. They clearly confuse us with their myrmidons.
Shapiro also points out how ridiculous it is to claim that you are saving money simply because you are not spending it:
As a slapdash example, a politician could project that they will increase spending by 5% next year and then decide at the last moment to increase it by 3%. They could then spin that decision to increase by a smaller amount as a decision to “cut” their spending (which wasn’t real spending, only projected spending) by 2%.
I remember a version of this audacious dishonesty back when the GOP held the house in the mid 90s. Medicare spending was slated to increase by something like five percent and the republicans wanted to instead increase spending by only three percent. The Democrats and their fawning media spun it as the GOP slashing medicare spending. For the most part, the leftist scare tactics worked.
Check out the Political Math Blog, and follow him on twitter at @PoliticalMath.
Posted in Dishonest Politicians | Tagged Federal Budget, News, Obama, Politics, statism | Leave a Comment »
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